1/20/2010 @ 1:35PM

Wildcatter Billionaire Tex Moncrief Hits Big Again

At 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 10 oil and gas tycoon W.A. (Tex) Moncrief Jr. was woken up by a phone call. On the line was James Robert Moffett, cochairman of
McMoran Exploration
. “Jim Bob told me, ‘Tex, we got it,’” says the 89-year-old Moncrief. “It looks like we got something by the tail.”

That something might be one of the biggest natural gas discoveries in the U.S. in decades. Known as Davy Jones, the field in the waters off Louisiana holds as much as 6 trillion cubic feet of gas (the energy equivalent of roughly 1 billion barrels of oil). Drilled to 28,000 feet below sea level, it cost some $100 million.

It’s rare on these ultradeep, high-risk wells to see anybody but publicly traded oil companies with skin in the game. Yet Moncrief owns 9% of Davy Jones himself and has pledged at least $100 million to buy into 11 other prospects that McMoran plans to drill nearby.

This octogenarian is just getting started. He’s worth something close to $1 billion (“It may go up a little with this discovery,” he allows), so he doesn’t need the money. His 20,000-acre ranch outside Fort Worth, Tex. sits in the middle of the Barnett Shale gas field. There’s enough gas for hundreds of wells. But Moncrief says he’s not slowing down. “I’m still looking for deals. Just going to keep looking and hoping, looking and hoping, that’s all you can do,” he says.

The Davy Jones field has inspired a pirate theme at Moncrief’s office, where a Jolly Roger flag and a poster of the tentacle-faced Davy Jones character from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies hang in the elevator.

Says Moncrief, “I learned everything from my daddy,” the wildcatter W.A. (Monty) Moncrief. When Tex was 10 he watched the first gusher from a 5-billion-barrel East Texas oilfield. Until now his biggest find was the Madden Deep field in Wyoming, with more than 3 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The opportunity to gamble on Davy Jones came from Moncrief’s long friendship with McMoran’s Moffett, 71. In 2006 McMoran was a minority partner with
ExxonMobil
in an offshore prospect called West Blackbeard, which Exxon later abandoned.

Moffett wanted to try again, eventually asking Moncrief last year to buy in. First production from Davy Jones won’t come until 2013 at the earliest. Moncrief hopes to be around to see it all before passing the company on to his four sons. His son Charles will run the business. Not that Tex plans to retire: “As long as your mind’s in good shape you can work until you die. That’s what my dad did. He died right here in the office working on a deal at age 91.”